Cowering heroes, (not so) merry-go-rounds, and someone gets lucky in Kamloops

We CAN learn from our haunted past...

Haunted Hospital - more on this later.

Hello one and all and all for one,

Today’s newsletter is about something super light-hearted and fun.

Just kidding. It’s about politics and public policy. Don’t pretend that didn’t send a thrill up your spine.

So, let’s get right to it…

Decampment (not so) merry-go-round: Vancouver to Prince George

After months of trying to coax people to move from inner city encampments to indoor housing, Vancouver city council again gave the go-ahead to dislodge people from their street-side occupation of the Downtown Eastside.

“It’s not safe for the people in the encampment, it’s not safe for the community,” BC Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon said days before the tents were dismantled following police and fire department reports of rampant fire hazards (16 tent fires in 2023 so far), increased crime and sexual assaults in the encampment.

The obvious challenge with forcible decampment is making sure displaced ‘campers’ have another place to go. But a less robustly discussed and more troubling complexity is how to help the people who suffer such debilitating mental illness and addictions they’re unable to live anywhere else.

In 2021, Prince George bylaw officers and BC Housing staff moved people from the city’s downtown Moccasin Flats encampment to newly converted supportive housing motels. There were enough shelter or supportive housing spots to accommodate all those living in tents, according to the city, but a handful of people refused to go. A judge ruled these last few had no viable housing alternative – whether they’d declined or been refused housing – “because of their substance use or mental health conditions.” So, the court ordered the city to stop cleaning up the encampment and to let the last four or five people continue living outside.

Like those now trying to return to the sidewalks of the Downtown Eastside, people soon re-populated Moccasin Flats in Prince George. And while BC’s housing minister talked about the 90 people they’ve already sheltered from Vancouver’s encampment and the couple hundred more housing units on the way, it all sounds like a familiar, doomed cycle.

People who are living on the sidewalks in the inner city need a lot more help than minimally trained staff can provide in a shelter, a single room occupancy (SRO) or a supportive housing unit.

Until we properly fund and deliver the intense array of services each person requires – whether taken up voluntarily or involuntarily – street campers will continue jeopardizing their own and the public’s safety, and remain stuck on this interminable encampment/decampment merry-go-round. Because no matter how many new units the province brings onstream, a small subset of troubled, street-entrenched individuals will always refuse, or be turned away from, even the lowest barrier shelter. And on the streets they’ll stay.

More help may be on the way

Which leads us to the Red Fish Healing Centre in Coquitlam (I toured it this week), a highly respected program that treats people with some of the most severe mental health and substance use disorders from across the province. Red Fish has been hailed by Premier Eby and others as a best practices treatment facility. For one, it treats mental illness and addictions issues concurrently. Whether the program can meet the complex needs of encampment inhabitants is unknown.

All Red Fish ‘clients’ must be referred by a health authority and about 60 per cent of current Red Fish participants were admitted involuntarily under the Mental Health Act. The program has gotten early accolades for its innovative treatment regimes. Initial patient successes from the nine-month-plus program show hopeful reductions in the severity of alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness, according to staff. But Red Fish only opened in late 2021 and can’t yet demonstrate long-term efficacy.

Even so, the province announced it will replicate the Red Fish model in other regions of BC. No word on when or where those beds will be since cross-ministry staff are only beginning the concept planning stage.

Lessons that haunt us

Up the road from Red Fish, on the same 244-acre property, sits its hulking predecessor: the old, and now partially abandoned, former Riverview Mental Hospital (so called in 1929). Massive and imposing, the main buildings of Riverview tower forbiddingly atop a hill, their former out-sized impervious majesty now a banquet for the ravenous forces of entropy, emanating a creepy, hollow presence.

Over its 100 years of operation, Riverview treated some of BC’s most troubled souls, delivering an evolving retinue of treatment deemed promising at the time. Riverview too was hailed for the various ground-breaking treatments it implemented over the decades (although its treatment practices eventually fell out of public favour and its doors were shuttered during the global deinstitutionalization wave).

Through the years, Riverview introduced many then-progressive innovations: a wing for men and a ‘female chronic’ building; it catered to war veterans and “delinquent” youths, and patients in “work therapy” built one of the biggest farm operations in the province. Many dedicated professionals who genuinely cared for and improved the lives of their patients surely passed through the institution’s corridors. But looking up at the rows of blackened, sometimes broken windows, it’s easy to imagine generations of ghostly faces gazing out through reinforced windows, hopeless and abandoned.

The former Riverview Mental Hospital is a favourite filming location. [Photo Fran Yanor]

How do we make sure Red Fish and other treatment programs help the people who need it? For a start, BC must do what the provincial coroner, the legislative health committee, the death panel review and others recommend: monitor current treatment programs, evaluate outcomes and regulate operations like every other health care facility in BC.

Government ministers, health practitioners and addiction specialists agree addiction is a health issue. But until the BC government takes the addictions and mental health treatment sector seriously, evaluating and regulating it as the Ministry of Health service it is, treatment programs will remain an unreliable patchwork of unproven often overly expensive experiments with the most vulnerable British Columbians as their test subjects.  

On a completely different topic…

Cedar LNG gets mixed reviews

Congratulations to Haisla First Nation and Pembina Pipeline Corporation for pulling Cedar LNG across the environmental assessment line last month. Like it or lump it, chief councillor Crystal Smith and her Haisla council and community set a monumental precedent with the project’s approval – the first Indigenous-majority-owned LNG project in Canada. Days later, Nisga’a followed when the Indigenous-led Ksi Lisims LNG project was approved.

Meanwhile, Cedar LNG was both hailed as a shining example of economic reconciliation and denounced as a step in the wrong direction environmentally, while others worried the government’s tough new emissions projects will be too onerous for prospective LNG proponents.  Regardless of how the rest of us feel, approval of Cedar LNG is cause for celebration in the Haisla community and a long-time coming for the nation.

Speaking of LNG…

First world thinking

If you had the choice between burning coal, wood, cow dung or natural gas to cook your food and heat your home, which would you choose?

As many as 2 billion people still cook or heat their homes with animal dung, which emits arsenic, among other poisons, when heated. [Photo Clean Cooking alliance]

At a press conference last month, Global TV journalist Richard Zussman asked Premier Eby if he was worried BC’s tougher emission standards on liquified natural gas projects would impede our “greater moral obligation” to export LNG to international markets now relying on coal. Instead of answering, Eby pivoted: “What British Columbians expect of us is that we meet the commitment that we made to them about our carbon pollution targets.” No doubt they do. But the question still bears answering.

What duty do we have, as Canadians living in a technologically advanced, resource-rich nation, to people in countries without enough clean energy sources to help them lower their emissions as well? Not just because air pollution anywhere contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and climate warming everywhere, but because it’s carcinogenic and is physically killing people in India, China, Bangladesh and elsewhere. Also, because they want to pull themselves out of abject poverty (as we have already done) and require a reliable power source to do so.

Are we really entitled to hoard resources that could save other people’s lives right now?

United they cower

Some shiny-eyed zealot posted an anonymous note about sabotaging numerous sections of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline. In a convoluted, braggy tale, the author expounded on the many ways and places they had possibly, probably, maybe (but not likely) damaged the pipeline.

Essentially, the writer posited s/he had vandalized sections of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline to intentionally cause a spill that damages the environment... as a protest against a pipeline they oppose because they say they’re worried it will damage the environment.

Huh?

That’s not all. Scrolling a little deeper, there’s another post on this website about a fallen comrade in the church burnings and additional links to a how-to-make-Molotov-cocktails page. Perfect for our existing Canadian anarchists(and visiting foreign helpers).

The website hosting the notes caters to anonymity and purports a disclaimer that it doesn’t “endorse or promote illegal, violent, and unlawful behaviour or actions or acts of intimidation.” News flash to the website owners: you can’t platform criminal calls to action, then feign the innocent bystander. Also, genuine power-to-the-people heroes don’t skulk around in the shadows.

(Thank you to Todd Corrigall for tweeting a link to the above post.)

Sex-Ed debacle and a lame-duck response

Some very messed up sex fetish flash cards found their way into the hands of Grade 8 and 9 students in Fort Nelson last month. Instead of showing you the cards – you can’t unsee them – we’re letting you choose to click the link above (or not) to view them in the Twitter post by Fort Nelson parent Fred McLaughlan.

According to an email from Northern Health and various media reports, a registered nurse from the Fort Nelson Health Clinic – in collaboration with the local Friendship Centre, and apparently with the implicit approval of Northern Health – provided the cards to students to take home following a sex-ed class. Parents were outraged. To his credit, Fort Nelson Secondary School principal Mark Lucas responded tout de suite with an apology, an explanation and remedial steps the school was taking to ensure it didn’t happen again.

A week later, local Peace River South MLA Dan Davies fired off a letter to the ministers of health and education basically asking, what the hell, ministers? Davies says in his letter the flash cards were the second such incident in Fort Nelson, with the previous one occurring at the Fort Nelson Secondary School. We look forward to hearing from the ministers on this one.

Meanwhile, Northern Health issued a prize-winner in the category of Most oblivious, unrepentant, defensive response by a public body.

NH excuse #1: the information is already available on the internet.

Of course fetishized sex acts are on the internet – every weird thing imaginable is on the internet. It doesn’t mean kids should be instructed about each of them in the classroom!

NH excuse #2: the information came from a credible, evidence-based source.

The content of the flash cards came from CATIE, which bills itself as Canada’s source for HIV and hepatitis C information. CATIE is an international organization that does outreach to many of society’s highest-risk populations for sexually transmitted disease – people who are street-entrenched, homeless, intravenous drug users, sex workers, trans men, among others (See the South London HIV and hepatitis C pilot mobile health unit and the Sexual health guide for queer trans men, trans masculine and non-binary people, the latter of which referenced some of the acts in the flash cards).

I’m all for thoughtful sexual education in schools, but who in their right mind thought ‘teaching materials’ aimed at those demographics would be appropriate for 13-year-olds just beginning to explore their own vulnerable sexualities?

De-escalation all part of the ‘good work’

For those of you who thought land stewardship was boring, let me introduce Simpcw First Nation chief George Lampreau.

These days, Lampreau and his nation are pushing back against provincial land use policies they disagree with and seizing opportunities for expanded resource stewardship decision-making on their own territory. All of which finds the BC minister in charge of land stewardship remarkably unperturbed. Nathan Cullen and his ministry staff are charged with developing massive changes in decision-making and land use processes to incorporate the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, various rights and title court decisions, and major shifts in policy, like the old growth deferrals, a watershed security strategy and making biodiversity an overarching priority.

While there is a lot of justifiable fear, confusion and aggression in Indigenous and non-Indigenous circles about what the changes mean, how they will be implemented and whether chaos will ensue, Cullen remains a calm, conciliatory, de-escalating force, calling for dialogue and patience as we all work our way through the long process of reconciliation. “That’s what the good work is,” Cullen said, citing a saying from his early 20s working for a non-profit in Africa: “People would say, ‘If you want to walk quickly, go alone. If you want to walk far, you have to do it together.’”

To glimpse the long view of where Indigenous self-government in BC might be headed, we look north to negotiations unfolding in the NWT, where more than a dozen Indigenous communities are negotiating resource stewardship, transboundary and self-government agreements.

Kamloops apartment block owner wins BC Housing lottery

After languishing on the real estate market for two-and-a-half years following a fire, a Kamloops apartment building was finally snapped up by BC Housing at three times its assessed value and nearly twice the price a local land developer estimates it was worth. “I was floored when I saw that they paid $12.8 million,” said commercial lender and land developer Joshua Knaak, whose company, FIT Financial, owns a bunch of real estate in the same block as the Cherry Avenue building bought by BC Housing last week.

Creating more subsidized housing is admirable, but overpaying like that drives up the price of rent and the cost of every other apartment building in town, Knaak said in an interview last week. “You just screwed up 1,000 units of housing.”

Even fixed up (about $550K of the $12.8 million will go towards renos), the most the local market would pay for each of the 42 one-bedroom apartments is about $1,500 a month, according to Knaak, who calculated that at that rate of return, a private investor could not viably pay more than $7 million.

“I can't, and neither can anybody in my circles, believe what an overpay that was.”

Keeping it civil in Winnipeg

We usually focus on provincial politics, but at Northern Beat we’re fans of civilized debate and off-script conversations with politicians, wherever and however they happen. So here’s a kind of ‘behind-the-curtain’ conversation the Globe and Mail flagged in its newsletter this week: an unscripted exchange between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a People’s Party of Canada supporter at the University of Manitoba.

Before you start spitting at the screen because I made you read HIS name or urged you to watch a clip about a kid who is against abortion, consider this: It is beside the point to me whether I adore or revile Trudeau and his party’s policies or whether I agree or disagree with his stance or the student’s. Whenever two people who fundamentally disagree on something, yet resist spiraling into personal insults and shouting over each other; when they manage to share their different perspectives with civility and reason, I call it a win. We need more of that. Our democracy literally depends on it.

On this lofty ideal, I bid you adieu, thank you for reading and wish you an excellent latter half of April.

(Now get back to that fun thing you were doing before you started reading this newsletter).

Cheers,

Fran

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